When historian and author Linda Gordon asked her New York University students if the name Dorothea Lange resonated with them, almost all said no. But when she asked them to describe a visual image of the Great Depression, many of them described one of Lange's most iconic photographs, Migrant Mother. Lange captured this image on a rainy day in February 1936 in Nipomo, California, at a pea-picker camp where her subject, Florence Thompson, a 32-year-old mother of ten, and 2,500 others had been living in tattered canvas lean-tos and fighting hunger with stolen vegetables and birds that had been killed by the camp's children.

Gordon's Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (Norton) is a masterly biography that illustrates the personal and professional struggles and achievements of a woman who was ahead of her time and who remains overshadowed by her work.

In 1902, at age seven, Lange contracted polio, which left her with both a limp and a fighting will "to see that beauty can be found in unlikely places." She enjoyed 16 successful years in San Francisco as a portrait photographer to the wealthy before she divorced the Western painter Maynard Dixon and set out on her journey from tradesman to artist. Along the way, she fell in love with Paul Schuster Taylor, an economics professor who admired her ambition, marrying him in 1935. With Taylor's guidance and devotion, Lange became a social-justice crusader chronicling the Dust Bowl, poverty, and racism in the Deep South from 1935 to 1941 for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, combating America's rural poverty during the Depression. Her photography depicted human despair at its deepest and with heart-wrenching dignity portrayed subjects who were fighting amid squalor for the better lives they deserved.

In 1942, the U.S. Army's Western Defense Command hired her to document the treatment of 120,000 Japanese Americans held in internment camps. Had the more than 800 photographs she captured been made public instead of impounded (very few were known to the public until 2006 with the release of Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Image of Japanese Internment, they might have encouraged the American public to open their eyes and question the internment policy; few at the time were critical of the camps.

Lange lost her battle with esophageal cancer in 1965, but her photographs will forever "evoke the best of American democracy," as Gordon puts it, and we will always be reminded by her work that "a camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera."